End Arguments Over What to Watch With a Simple Swipe
A Designlab capstone project: End to End Application
This project was completed through Designlab’s UX Academy. I led this project solo end-to-end and took on the roles of researcher and designer. The estimated project length was 80 hours.
The Opportunity 🌟
A typical night in my household, especially a weekend night, involves my husband and I settling down on the living room couch to watch a movie or TV show. We usually start with Netflix by looking at the newly released movies and shows to watch. After about ten minutes of scrolling, we move onto the next streaming service, usually HBO Max — spirits are still high, since HBO Max typically has some good options. Fifteen minutes go by, and we’ve watched about three movie trailers. Now we’re starting to get frustrated… Nathan is more in the mood for an action movie, while I want to watch a thriller. Okay… moving onto Amazon Prime… twenty minutes pass, and we still haven’t picked something to watch. We begrudgingly open the Apple TV app, scroll past a few featured titles, and finally call it quits. It’s just easier to split up — he’ll play video games upstairs while I read a book.
Sound familiar? With so many streaming services available, each with hundreds (if not thousands) of movies and shows to choose from, settling on one movie or show to watch is near impossible — especially if you’re wanting to watch it with one or more other people.
How might we make selecting a movie or show to watch at home enjoyable and efficient, whether you’re watching alone or with one or more other people?
The Who 👫
Based on several virtual and in-person user interviews, I narrowed the market opportunity to two primary users: solo watches and group watches.
Solo watchers
Meet Sal the solo watcher. Sal is a 29 year-old computer programmer who lives in the Seattle, Washington area. He is single and lives alone in his apartment.
Sal’s goal is to easily find a movie/show to watch that meets the mood he’s currently in. However, it usually takes “forever” to find a movie/show to watch — he feels like he ends up scrolling through streaming platforms for hours.
When searching for a movie/show, Sal looks for content that is highly critically acclaimed. He often uses Rotten Tomatoes to look up critics’ ratings. Sal also relies on word-of-mouth — hearing about a movie/show for multiple weeks from other people increases his interest in the content. He engages with others both in-person and online when it comes to discussing movies and shows.
Group watchers
Meet Gina the group watcher. Gina is a 35 year-old freelance artist who lives in Atlanta, Georgia with her fiancé.
Gina’s goal is the find new movies and shows to watch and be introduced to genres and actors she hasn’t watched before. She is very open to expanding her repertoire of movies and shows.
She doesn’t like watching movies/shows by herself and very much prefers watching with her fiancé. Gina doesn’t like watching movies/shows that take place in “older” time periods, such as the 1800s. She enjoys movies and shows that take place in modern day. Gina feels strongly that word-of-mouth and peer reviews are more valuable and telling to the quality of the content than critics’ reviews.
The Research 🔍
In-person and virtual user interviews were conducted to get to the root goals, pain points, and needs of users when it comes to selecting a movie/show to watch.
Interview questions explored with users:
- What streaming services do you actively use / have subscriptions to? Why?
- Which factors come into play when you’re deciding which movie or show to watch? Why?
- What helps you select a movie or show to watch? Why? [accelerators]
- What prevents you from selecting a movie or show to watch? Why? [pain points]
- How often do you watch a movie or show with someone else? Why?
- Is it harder or easier to select a movie or show to watch with someone else versus by yourself? Why?
It was imperative to leverage the 5 Whys framework when interviewing users in order to truly understand their thoughts and feelings.
I also spent quite a bit of time researching competitors currently in the market. Several solutions for selecting a movie/show to watch do exist, such as pickamovieforme.com and datenightmovies.com. Rotten Tomatoes even has a feature on their website that recommends movies to watch based on user input.
While solution exist in the market, they are:
- not well known,
- do not have accessible user interfaces, and
- do not provide enjoyable user experiences.
Through my solution, I focused on creating a more enjoyable, accessible, and efficient experiences for users. A large theme from the user interviews was how much time it takes to select a movie/show to watch.
How might we reduce the time it takes for someone to pick a movie or show to watch?
The Design 📱
Gina arrives home on a Friday evening after a busy, hectic work day. She texts her fiancé, who lets Gina know she’ll be home in an hour or two, as her boss is keeping her late.
“Working past 5pm on a Friday?” Gina sighs.
Since she has an hour to spare until her fiancé gets home, Gina takes her dogs for a walk around the neighborhood.
Finally, Gina’s fiancé arrives home, and they decide to order a pizza to be delivered for dinner, as they are both too tired to cook dinner tonight. While they wait on the pizza to arrive, Gina and her fiancé decide to settle down on the couch and watch a movie. Gina’s fiancé still needs some time to decompress after work, so she opens her phone and scrolls through TikTok.
Meanwhile, Gina starts the process of picking out a movie they can watch together. She remembers a new app her friend recommended a few days ago at work. Gina opens her phone and navigates to the app. She is greeted with a few simple questions, asking her if she wants to watch a movie or TV show, which streaming services she owns and uses, and if she has any movie preferences.
“So far, this is a pretty easy process,” Gina thinks.
Gina prefers specific dramas, so she selects “Drama,” “Romance,” “Thriller,” and “Science fiction.”
Gina is then brought through a few screens, each of which have a movie suggestion. Gina swipes left or right, depending on if the movie presented seems interesting to her.
“This is fun! It reminders me of being on Tinder, which is how I met my fiancé — good memories!” Gina thinks.
After swiping left or right on a few movie suggestions, Gina is able to invite her fiancé to the application so she can share her own preferences.
“This is neat! We can pick a movie together without hours of scrolling through Netflix!” Gina thinks.
After her fiancé submits her responses in the app, they are presented with several movie recommendations. After a quick discussion, they settle on one, kick back, and begin to relax and enjoy their Friday evening.
The Branding ✍️
Branding for this application/project began with a mood board. Exploring photos of people watching movies and shows at home and a theaters led to insights such as:
- Deep red hues are highly present in the movie/film industry
- There is a theme of reds and yellows — e.g., popcorn bins
- Darker color palettes are more common to promote luxury and class
The final color palette for this version of the application intentionally balanced deep red, blues, and a yellow accent color. These colors will remind users of the movies and watching television with the use of the classic red and yellow combination — perhaps thoughts and smells of popcorn will arise in their minds. Blues were chosen to complement the red color and to act as the primary color across the application. Users will feel calm and not rushed through the application experience.
My Reflection 💭
Highlights
Overall, this was an enjoyable project. At first, I was intimidated at the thought of having to design an end-to-end application focused on one primary feature. However, I’ve learned that once I hurdle over my initial fears and simply get started on the work, the process goes fairly smoothly.
I intentionally wanted to design an app that didn’t relate to industries I’m familiar with (healthcare, podcasts, small businesses). I thought about my personal daily struggles, settled on the frustrations of selecting what to watch at night with my husband, then validated the problem statement with users.
Next time
If I were to do this project again, I would spend even more time on competitive analysis. I would like to dive further into the solutions that currently exist in the market and complete a more detailed analysis to understand which of their features work well, don’t work well, are enjoyed by users, are not enjoyed by users, etc. Doing a deeper competitive analysis would help me further understand how to create an improved, more valuable experience for users through my product/solution.
Next steps
For next steps, I would continue testing with users and iterating based on their feedback — thus following the standard design thinking process. I would also dive deeper into the branding of the application, as the current color palette and branding is a first-pass.
